by Henry James
To go with her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which, from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, was possible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course on the face of it the most “marked” of demonstrations—which was exactly why Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening of the day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn’t been able not to reach out to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. It was as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to be almost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it and call it by—it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence, of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing, couldn’t but have for himself some definite basis. She only wondered about the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describe it; that would quite do for her—it even would have done for her, he could see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said he was waiting for money or clothes, for letters or for orders from Fleet Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never took a step. He hadn’t in the event quite sunk to that; but he had none the less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham’s leaving them alone—Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious—his acquaintance with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels incapable of purchase. It even didn’t help him, oddly, that he was sure Kate would in some way have spoken for him—or rather not so much in some way as in one very particular way. He hadn’t asked her, at the last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there, in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.
Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this creature, to be awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the young women’s last talks was that—if Milly absolutely must have the truth about it—Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn’t follow her—or didn’t appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from following her Mrs. Lowder couldn’t pretend, in scenes, the renewal of which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn’t snub him as she might. She did nothing in fact but snub him—wouldn’t that have been part of the story?—only Aunt Maud’s suspicions were of the sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same token, reasonable enough—as he now, for that matter, well might; he had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from London was to exist away from Kate Croy—which was a gain, much appreciated, to the latter’s comfort. There was a minute, at this hour, out of Densher’s three, during which he knew the terror of Milly’s uttering some such allusion to their friend’s explanation as he must meet with words that wouldn’t destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her mercy—what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly’s letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.
These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure; whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with Kate’s version as a version to adopt. He couldn’t stand up to lie—he felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes, letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty of the chance for him—there before him like a temptress painted by Titian—to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.
The explosion lighted her face. “You’ll do your book here?”
“I hope to begin it.”
“It’s something you haven’t begun?”
“Well, only just.”
“And since you came?”
She was so full of interest that he shouldn’t perhaps after all be too easily let off. “I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken ground.”
Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper. “I’m afraid we’ve made an awful mess of your time.”
“Of course you have. But what I’m hanging on for now is precisely to repair that ravage.”
“Then you mustn’t mind me, you know.”
“You’ll see,” he tried to say with ease, “how little I shall mind anything.”
“You’ll want”—Milly had thrown herself into it—“the best part of your days.”
He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. “Oh I shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for you.” And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn’t help him moreover that he visibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest for comfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate’s so signal snub, and also the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectual effort. This at least was his crucifixion—that Milly was so interested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if he found his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decently answering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quite particularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to tea with him—an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. “We depend on you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we’re coming”—the extremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact. Facing their visit itself—to that, no matter what he might have to do, he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even though it might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at the top of Kate’s list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough, deep within, if Kate’s view of that especial propriety had not been modified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quite likely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact. It pleased him to think of “tact” as his present prop in doubt; that glossed his predicament over, for it was of application among the sensitive and the kind. He wasn’t inhuman, in fine, so long as it would serve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweeten Milly’s hopes. He didn’t want to be rude to them, but he still less wanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that, casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her,
he put his foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. “Will it be safe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?”
“‘Safe’—?” She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but he didn’t need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably, she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his life. He couldn’t emphasize that he thought of her as dying, yet he couldn’t pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions. Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. “You suppose me so awfully bad?”
He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me.”
“Well then, I’m splendid.”
“Oh I don’t need you to tell me that.”
“I mean I’m capable of life.”
“I’ve never doubted it.”
“I mean,” she went on, “that I want so to live—!”
“Well?” he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.
“Well, that I know I can.”
“Whatever you do?” He shrank from solemnity about it.
“Whatever I do. If I want to.”
“If you want to do it?”
“If I want to live. I can,” Milly repeated.
He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the pity of it. “Ah then that I believe.”
“I will, I will,” she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow turned for him to mere light and sound.
He felt himself smiling through a mist. “You simply must!”
It brought her straight again to the fact. “Well then, if you say it, why mayn’t we pay you our visit?”
“Will it help you to live?”
“Every little helps,” she laughed, “and it’s very little for me, in general, to stay at home. Only I shan’t want to miss it—!”
“Yes?”—she had dropped again.
“Well, on the day you give us a chance.”
It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only when he had left her. “You can come,” he said, “when you like.”
What had taken place for him, however—the drop, almost with violence, of everything but a sense of her own reality—apparently showed in his face or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it for something else. “I see how you feel—that I’m an awful bore about it and that, sooner than have any such upset, you’ll go. So it’s no matter.”
“No matter? Oh!”—he quite protested now.
“If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go.”
It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, at any rate, he shook his head. “I won’t go.”
“Then I won’t go!” she brightly declared.
“You mean you won’t come to me?”
“No—never now. It’s over. But it’s all right. I mean, apart from that,” she went on, “that I won’t do anything I oughtn’t or that I’m not forced to.”
“Oh who can ever force you?” he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, at all times, of speaking for her encouragement. “You’re the least coercible of creatures.”
“Because, you think, I’m so free?”
“The freest person probably now in the world. You’ve got everything.”
“Well,” she smiled, “call it so. I don’t complain.”
On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. “No I know you don’t complain.”
As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. His telling her she had “everything” was extravagant kind humour, whereas his knowing so tenderly that she didn’t complain was terrible kind gravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as well have praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was the way she just looked him again, and it was of no attenuation that she took him up more gently than ever. “It isn’t a merit-when one sees one’s way.”
“To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not.”
“I mean to keeping what one has.”
“Oh that’s success. If what one has is good,” Densher said at random, “it’s enough to try for.”
“Well, it’s my limit. I’m not trying for more.” To which then she added with a change: “And now about your book.”
“My book—?” He had got in a moment so far from it.
“The one you’re now to understand that nothing will induce either Susie or me to run the risk of spoiling.”
He cast about, but he made up his mind. “I’m not doing a book.”
“Not what you said?” she asked in a wonder. “You’re not writing?”
He already felt relieved. “I don’t know, upon my honour, what I’m doing.”
It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she didn’t know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of the sense that he, on his side, might complain, what she clearly wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however, she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
“Then if it’s not for your book—?”
“What am I staying for?”
“I mean with your London work—with all you have to do. Isn’t it rather empty for you?”
“Empty for me?” He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the vagueness of his reply. “Oh well—!”
“I ask too many questions?” She settled it for herself before he could protest. “You stay because you’ve got to.”
He grasped at it. “I stay because I’ve got to.” And he couldn’t have said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan. Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of—the permission from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either niece or aunt he mustn’t stir without it. All this Densher read in the girl’s sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he thought of was, in an instant, “Isn’t it enough, whatever you may be one’s other complications, to stay after all for you?”
“Oh you must judge.”
He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too restless. The speech in question at least wasn’t disloyal to Kate; that was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was staying so little “for” Milly that he was staying positively against her. He didn’t, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness, didn’t care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or worse. “Well then, so long as I don’t go, you must think of me all as judging!”
—II—
He didn’t go home, on leaving her—he didn’t want to; he walked instead, through his narrow ways and his campi with gothic arches, to a small and comparatively sequestered café where he had already more than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with solutions that consisted mainly and pleasant
ly of further indecisions. It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn’t because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with. When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities mattered. It wasn’t a case for pedantry; when people were at her pass everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of a spring, just completely his own—to the extent, as he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn’t would have close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands—and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on the cards for him that he might kill her—that was the way he read the cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong—if the difference even survived—had heard it in a vivid “Hush!” the injunction to keep from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.
What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his really bringing to a point, on Milly’s side, anything whatever. Nothing so “brought,” he easily argued, but must be in one way or another a catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that should be better, was mixed up in him, so that a single false motion might either way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, these considerations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminously amounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after all with the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge without the girl’s leave—not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it, whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate’s. It was to this his wisdom reduced itself—to the need again simply to be kind. That was the same as being still—as studying to create the minimum of vibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wall of which something precious was too precariously hung. A false step would bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was aware when he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn’t at this juncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he was wanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for the idle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap, and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supported him. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace to dinner. He didn’t want, in short, to give that up, and he should probably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He should be able to be still enough through everything.